The rejections piled up one after another as leaders of Alpha School, a growing network of private school campuses, tried to convince states that their artificial-intelligence-led teaching model belonged in publicly funded charter schools.

The Alpha system is centered on the idea that students can “crush academics,” like reading and math lessons, in just two hours a day. AI software teaches the lessons. The human teachers, referred to as guides, focus on motivation and emotional support. “School is broken, and we’re here to fix it,” Alpha’s “2 Hour Learning” tagline claims.

But over the last two years, officials in numerous states have questioned the model, characterizing it as “untested” and ”experimental.” In North Carolina, one charter school board member feared two hours was “not nearly enough” to teach required subjects. A month earlier, in August 2024, an official in Utah worried that the school’s instructors may act more like “a life coach” than a teacher.

Even the largely conservative Texas State Board of Education, which had approved most charter applications over the last decade, rejected Alpha’s pitch last summer.

“I’m just a little skeptical of those types of gains,” said Keven Ellis, a Republican board member in Texas, in response to Alpha’s claims of massive improvements in student academic outcomes over short periods of time.

By this spring, Alpha had applied to form charter schools in at least 10 states, according to an Instagram post from co-founder MacKenzie Price in March. Only Arizona had said yes.

“I’ve met with White House representatives. Policy makers at the federal and state level. Decision makers who hold the fate of our society in their hands,” said Price in the Instagram post, months after Texas rejected the company’s charter pitch. “Unfortunately, change is hard.”

What Price didn’t mention in her post was that Texas leaders were rolling out a new education program that would allow private schools to earn state funding, and Alpha School was set to benefit. The inaugural voucher initiative would award tax dollars for select students’ homeschooling or private school tuition. Price and her husband, Andy, had personally pushed for vouchers by donating over $2 million, before and after the program was approved, to Texas legislators and political action committees that helped pass the controversial program and oversee it.

Now, just one year after the state rejected its charter school application, Alpha has roughly quadrupled its Texas private schools, with more than 30 virtual and in-person campuses, most of which were accepted into the voucher program, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. This rapid expansion has made Alpha among the largest private school chains participating in the voucher initiative.

“They took a backdoor approach,” said Democrat Tiffany Clark, one of several Texas State Board of Education members who voted against Alpha’s charter school application last summer and were concerned with its entrance into the voucher program. “They said, ‘You know what, we can’t get in as a charter, but we can continue to be a private school and take these funds.’”

Texas and Arizona appear to be the first states where Alpha’s campuses have been approved to participate in school choice programs, though they could qualify in others. After starting with one campus in Austin, the chain now has private schools in 17 states and Puerto Rico. Most of those states run voucher programs.

As ProPublica reported in July, private schools across the country have multiplied in recent years, often with little oversight, alongside the growth of state voucher programs. The result is that taxpayer dollars sometimes go to school leaders who have misused public funds or have documented histories of abusing children. Elected leaders in Texas, which has one of the newest and largest voucher programs in the country, promised that they had implemented strong guardrails, including some that other states had not.

But Alpha School’s acceptance into the voucher program, after state education leaders rejected the same model just last year, underscores the limitations of those standards, according to education experts. Alpha leaders didn’t apply again to the state education board but to the Texas comptroller’s office, essentially the state’s chief financial officer, which legislators designated to run the voucher program. The comptroller checked for only four criteria: that a school operates in Texas, that it’s accredited by an approved organization, that it’s been in operation at least two years and that it administers annual standardized tests.

None of Alpha’s private schools had to meet state curriculum standards or show how the company’s model would lead to student success. None of........

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